Category Archives: Quotes

“There are many near-term benefits to applying analytics to user experience design. And the long-term promises so much. So there needs to be a wedding of web analytics and user experience. Designers need to get better with data to finally be able to design for finding, as well as to better communicate with managers, business analysts, and, to a degree, information technologists and developers. Designers will have to learn a foreign language to win them over. That language is data.” – Louis Rosenfeld

“What UX designers offer that’s special is help building a vision for what the product can and should be. This is not a reductive ‘getting things done’ approach. It’s a generative ‘what does this have the potential to be’ kind of approach. A good UX designer should encourage the team to ask that question, facilitate a process that brings the whole team along in answering it, and then make those answers tangible, doable, and, yes, a little bit pretty.” – Leah Buley

“No design can exist in isolation. It is always related, sometimes in very complex ways, to an entire constellation of influencing situations and attitudes. What we call a good design is one which achieves integrity – that is, unity or wholeness – in balanced relation to its environment.” – George Nelson

“I think a successful company is one where everybody owns the same mission. Out of necessity, we divide ourselves up into discipline groups. But the goal when you are actually doing the work is to somehow forget what discipline group you are in and come together. So in that sense, nobody should own user experience; everybody should own it.” – Don Norman

Read more from an interview with Don Norman on where user experience should be positioned within a company in this article.

“I think if you’re starting out early in the process by talking about your ideas for solutions, you’re already not listening. I think you need to enter into any design project with that zen learner’s mind of ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’” – Kim Goodwin

Hear more from Kim Goodwin on “Excelling at Interaction Design” in this podcast from Jared Spool.

“My definition of a ‘customer centric’ culture is where people are asking the right questions to the right people, who are able and willing to collaborate to provide their insights. In such a culture, over time, individuals ask the right questions more often and get the right answers more often. This is a reinforcing feedback loop. As this culture takes hold, more and more of the solutions coming out of the group would yield positive customer experiences.” – Secil Watson

Read more from Secil in Richard Anderson’s Riander Blog entry “Breaking Silos.” Secil describes why collaboration and integrated work practices are critical to the success of any team.